The branded social profile is dead. Gone are the days that users hop from page to page consuming and engaging with branded social content. And while many marketers blame these shifts on the social channels themselves, the reality of the situation is that user behaviors have changed.

Modern digital users are seeking experiences that go beyond the Facebook post or the tweet. They’re seeking something of true, authentic value. And while your audience may not be consuming your brand’s social content the way they were a few years ago, that doesn’t mean social media is dead. In the modern age of digital marketing, social media is a mindset, not a platform.

The social media mindset is about engaging with sharable experiences — and that type of interaction shouldn’t be limited to social channels. Integrating the social mindset with your other digital marketing efforts makes your entire marketing ecosystem more engaging and sharable, giving you the power to control the user experience, collect more relevant data and stimulate growth across interconnected digital channels. Here are a few places to start integrating the social media mindset across your digital marketing efforts:

Custom Audiences

Is the Facebook algorithm getting you down? Take control of it with custom audiences. Both Facebook and Twitter allow you to build dynamic audiences based on web traffic, app behaviors, and email lists. These tools are incredibly powerful for integrating your marketing efforts and delivering personalized, contextual messaging to your audience subsets.

Put these tools to use and your social content becomes about more than likes and shares — it becomes a powerfully targeted conversion-driving machine.

Web Experiences

The social mindset revolves around sharability — and that shouldn’t be limited to a social channel. Whether you’re producing high-quality editorial content or building interactive web experiences, there are countless ways to turn your audience into social advocates.

The trick is knowing what types of content will motivate your fan base to share. Take Rockefeller Center, for example. What better way to bring the Rock Center experience to life than spotlighting user-generated photos from the Top of the Rock?

We built a live hub of users’ Instagram photos right on rockefellercenter.com. The results were shocking: Users who interacted with the UGC hub spent twice as long on the site and converted at a rate three times higher than the average site visitor.

Social Login

So, owning the social experience on your website is huge. But collecting the right data is even bigger. Using a social login tool (I personally advocate for the Tradable Bits fan CRM as much as possible), you can tap into social graphs to understand exactly who is interacting with your web experiences and how — name, email address, social connections, interests, behaviors—you name it. Once you start collecting this data, you can get really creative with those custom audiences I was talking about earlier.

Email Marketing

Email and social are an inbound marketing team to be reckoned with, and there are tons of ways to use the two together.

Start by loading your email lists into your social accounts. This will allow you to compare your subscribers against social data like behaviors, interests, and other psychographics — Facebook and Twitter audience insights are full of info on your audiences. Understanding this information can inform your email content, making it more relevant and sharable.

Once you understand these fine details about your email lists, you can start streamlining the messaging you’re pushing out across channels. Use the power of email and social together to build a unified digital ecosystem, where your brand messaging resonates throughout the user journey at every relevant touchpoint.

Twitter LeadGen Cards

While we’re on the subject of email, let’s look at an easy way to use social to bulk up your mailing list.

With a single click, users send their email address directly to your marketing automation platform. That’s a lot to ask, so you have to be willing to give something in return. Great content is a good place to start. Free stuff doesn’t hurt either. Run different campaigns targeting different audience segments, then reel them in through the user funnel with differentiated email content.

SEO/SEM

So now your social media and email marketing efforts are working together. Complete your digital network by incorporating search into the mix. Use your audience’s social data to inform which keywords to bid on, and how to prioritize for different search queries. Alternately, use the email/social power team to stimulate social sharing and give your content more authority in search algorithms.

The digital ecosystem is complex and non-linear. Each user journey is different, but by integrating you efforts you can reach everyone in your funnel at the right time with the right content. Learn more about HZ’s approach to integrated digital marketing.